DC Officials Showing Up Where Young People Hang Out to Boost Obamacare Enrollment

Young people aren’t signing up for Obamacare. Sure, Healthcare.gov is partially built and sort of works, but they still haven’t come. And considering that the premiums paid by the young and healthy are needed to offset the cost of treatment for the sick and elderly, the financial viability of the law largely rests on their shoulders.

So what is an administration to do?

Thus far we’ve seen the president of the United States call on bartenders to host happy hours for his signature health care law, Obamacare advocates push ads geared toward young people that are so objectionable you’ll wonder if they’re real, and now officials in Washington, D.C. are showing up where they “party by night and shop by day,” Fox News reports. This, my friends, is what desperation looks like:

Officials on Saturday visited two Footlocker stores where Nike’s exclusive Air Jordan 12 “Taxi” sneakers were going on sale. And they are scheduled to visit two Denny’s restaurants from 2 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sunday.

“My motto is ‘Get them health care while you get them Jordans,” DC Health Links representative Vanessa Brooks told Fox News outside a Footlocker in the city’s downtown.

“Get some health care to go along with them taxis, OK?” Brooks told those at the store. “You got to have it. And you need it.” […]

Brooks and other so-called “assisters” plan to make contact this weekend with hundreds of young D.C. residents and encourage them to make appointments to enroll in insurance plans. [...]

At the Denny's restaurants, the assisters will set up shop to provide information, answer questions and enroll residents.

Convincing “young invincibles” to sign up for Obamacare will be no easy feat, however, and showing up where they hang out doesn’t exactly seem like a winning strategy. After Harvard's recent poll showing that “40% of young Americans believe Obamacare will bring worse care, 51% believe it will bring higher costs and 57% said they disapprove of the president's signature law,” there better be a Plan B Plan C in the works.